Herbert O'Driscoll, in front of the 9th century round tower at Glendalough, the ancient monastic city in County Wicklow, Ireland, during one of many pilgrimages he led to Celtic Christian sites.Family photo courtesy of Michael Valpy/Supplied
Rev. Thomas Herbert O’Driscoll, a mesmerizing Anglican preacher who moved from his native Ireland to Canada in the mid-1950s, was widely considered one of the most influential figures of the contemporary Christian church.
“Herb took his stand at the crossroads of society and Christian faith, illuminating the world of our time and our lives with a depth of insight and sensitivity that was more than profound, it was transformational,” said Rev. Richard LeSueur, a senior clergyman in the Anglican Diocese of Calgary and a friend and colleague of Canon O’Driscoll’s for more than 40 years.
“He was an interpreter of our times. He was prophetic, not in the sense of predicting the future, but in terms of locating the times into a larger sweep of history, part of that being the biblical story.”
Canon O’Driscoll died on July 25 in Victoria. He was 95.
The clergyman was invited regularly over decades to give public lectures and radio commentaries, prepare broadcast documentaries on such disparate topics as Irish mysticism, the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Greek, Roman and Celtic history, and speak about ethics to gatherings of business leaders, students, theologians, cabinet ministers, senior civil servants and members of Parliament.
Canon LeSueur quoted Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s dictum that “when you preach, preach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other … and that is exactly what Herb did.” He wanted his listeners to find themselves in the biblical stories, in the human emotions at play, the subtleties of conversation, the political motivations. “He would often say, ‘Trust the story, Richard, and enter into it in the setting,’” Canon LeSueur said.
Lay Canon Ian Alexander, currently the Anglican Church of Canada’s prolocutor (its most senior lay official), said the media loved him because he knew how to give a sound bite. “He knew that a two-minute radio commentary would have far more impact than a 20-minute sermon. He knew how to deliver a punchy message that got through to people.”
In 1967, Canada’s centennial year, Canon O’Driscoll addressed a breakfast meeting of senior government representatives, one of whom was John Matheson, parliamentary secretary to then-prime minister Lester Pearson.
Canon O’Driscoll spoke about the Bible’s New Testament Letter to the Hebrews and its long list of biblical leaders – Noah, Abraham, Moses, Sarah, the prostitute Rahab, Gideon and on and on – who were motivated in their actions by faith and God’s direction to work for the common good. He finished with the quotation from Hebrews Chapter 11, Verse 16: “They desire a better country.”
At the end of the talk, Mr. Matheson told Canon O’Driscoll confidentially that the government was working on a new Canadian honours system. “But we have a problem,” he said. “We haven’t been able to agree on a suitable motto.” Mr. Matheson said he thought “They desire a better country” could be the perfect fit, and so together they reached into their boarding school Latin for a translation, “Desiderantes meliorem patriam,” which became the motto for the Order of Canada.
Herb O’Driscoll was born in Cork, in the south of Ireland, on Oct. 17, 1928. He remained in Cork during his childhood and student years, but spent summers on his grandfather’s farm in Donaguile, County Kilkenny.
He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (where he won the gold medal for oratory), and ordained as a priest in the Protestant (Anglican) Church of Ireland in 1953.
“I had met the person who would one day become my wife,” he wrote in his autobiography, I Will Arise and Go Now: Reflections on the Meaning of Places and People. “I was torn between wanting to go to Canada and not wanting to leave Paula. In the end we agreed on a plan. We would become engaged, I would go to Canada and return the following summer for the wedding.”
He sailed across the Atlantic in 1954, and briefly returned to Ireland the following year to marry, then settled permanently in Canada with his wife.
His first church job was as a Royal Canadian Navy chaplain, reaching out to people who weren’t particularly churchy.
From 1962 to 1967, he was rector of Ottawa’s St. John the Evangelist parish; from 1968 to 1982 he was rector of Vancouver Christ Church Cathedral; from 1982 to 1984 he was warden of the U.S. Episcopal Church’s National College of Preachers in Washington; from 1983 to 1993 he was rector of Calgary’s Christ Church (Elbow Park) parish, and in 1993 he became a visiting scholar at the Anglican Church’s St. George’s College in Jerusalem. He retired in 1995 and was appointed an honorary assistant at Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria.
Herbert O'Driscoll welcomes the Dalai Lama to Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver in 1980.Courtesy of Michael Valpy/Supplied
Clergy and church congregations across Canada and wherever else he preached spoke in interviews of feeling changed by listening to him, of feeling transported effortlessly by his descriptive words and narrative style back through time from a pew in 20th- or 21st-century North America to Galilee or Jerusalem at the dawn of the Christian era.
Priests and pastors had his books in their studies – he wrote more than 50 books. Many received his weekly notes on the Bible readings for the next Sunday, which they used as the basis for their own sermons. They continued to arrive in inboxes up to the last months of his life.
Canon Alexander, who was instrumental in launching Canon O’Driscoll’s popular and widely syndicated broadcasts in the 1970s and 80s (called One Man’s Journal) on Vancouver radio station CHQM remembers that he would arrive in the studio fresh from his latest preaching or teaching trip, having drafted 10 new commentaries in longhand on the flight home.
His preaching style was called “narrative”: a discipline he taught for many years in week-long seminars at Washington’s College of Preachers, now being continued at the annual O’Driscoll Forum on Preaching, an endowed program at Vancouver School of Theology’s summer school. He would begin homilies by saying, “Let me tell you a story” or “Come with me down this long corridor of time.” He connected his preaching to the great mythologies of human existence. He led more than 20 pilgrimages to Celtic Ireland, Celtic Scotland and England, and to the biblical lands.
Canon Alexander said his colleague perfected the technique of collapsing the space between there and then and here and now. “He practised what he called ‘Christian midrash’ – filling in the imaginative spaces between the words in the biblical text.” He saw faith as an act of the imagination in the context of the spiritual sweep of history, bringing together the past and the present. He was critical of much of the Christian church for not connecting with postmodernism, the term given to human efforts to define their own sense of reality in the wake of a dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment’s excessive reliance on scientific or rational definitions.
Canon LeSueur said Canon O’Driscoll embraced St. Jerome’s notion of five Gospels: four in the biblical New Testament’s account on the life and teaching of Jesus and the fifth on the Middle East Holy Land. “If you understand the fifth,” Dr. LeSueur said, “you’ll understand the four.”
Peter Elliott, the recently retired dean of Vancouver’s Anglican Christ Church Cathedral, says Canon O’Driscoll was a Jungian who saw in the Bible stories not so much didactic religious instruction, but narratives reflecting some of the deepest meanings and patterns of human feelings and a re-enchantment of the world, an explanation of why Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” Children understood enchantment. (One of his favourite works of literature was C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series.) He was critical of the church too often seeing Christianity in two-dimensional flatness where meaning was lost.
Much of Canon O’Driscoll’s theology embraced the spiritual notion of journey, according to Michael Ingham, Vancouver’s former Anglican Bishop of New Westminster.
Canon O’Driscoll was fond of preaching about Exodus, the second book of the Bible, which at one level recounted the Israelites’ flight from slavery in Egypt but which he – like theologians Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu and mythologist Joseph Campbell – saw as a journey through wilderness, through periods of great change and turmoil, to a new spiritual understanding.
To that end, as dean of Christ Church Vancouver during the peak and aftermath of the countercultural movement, he welcomed anti-Vietnam war protesters into the cathedral, invited the Dalai Lama to participate in a service, asked folk singers Ian & Sylvia to perform, and had his staff organize folk masses and in one instance a rock mass where he noted the cathedral floor was shaking.
“I think he was excited by the fact that a younger generation didn’t want to go to church but nevertheless had a deep yearning and appetite for spirituality,” Canon Alexander said.
Under Canon O’Driscoll, the cathedral became very much a part of the active social fabric of Vancouver. For him, religion was not something set apart but part of society’s active concerns today.
He was an avid moviegoer. He was fascinated by Star Wars and by mythic storytelling on a grand scale. His favourite films were Zorba the Greek and Babette’s Feast, both classics that explore aspects of the human condition
The inspiration for Canon O’Driscoll’s homiletics – what’s been called his theology of panoramic preaching – came from the world of stories, news, texts, myths, literature and films around him and the technology that has made their transmission possible. Invited at age 92 to give an Easter Day sermon on Zoom, he accepted at once. “After all,” he explained, “I’m hard-wired for preaching.”
Canon O’Driscoll leaves his wife, Paula (née Lucy); children, Deirdre, Erin, Moira and Niall; 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren; and brothers, Percy and Terry.
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